Saturday morning I rolled out onto the streets of Hell’s Kitchen at 5 am to see if my taxi fleet would have a car for me after I’d taken last weekend off to study. It was 22 degrees F and the weather had turned quite cold again after having warmed up finally for three or four days during the week. Although the sun is rising earlier now as we’re two months past the winter solstice, it’s still dark at that hour. As I rounded the corner of 37th St. I walked past a homeless man sleeping huddled against a truck, his body sheltered underneath a heavy zippered garment bag next to his shopping cart of personal possessions–a reminder that people are suffering in this city right under our noses all the time.

I greeted Foster, the dispatcher, and asked him if he had a car for me today. “You have to go over to the garage and get it,” he said, and I hitched a ride over to 44th St. with Kim, a Korean driver who was heading out to begin his shift. I arrived at the garage as the African mechanic was finishing installing a new fan belt; after waiting 10 minutes or so, he said it was okay to drive, and I backed out of the garage and onto the street.

As I printed out the stats from the meter, info that you’re required to log onto your trip sheet, I noticed that the meter buttons weren’t registering very quickly–in fact, there was about a three or four second delay, and sometimes they didn’t start the meter at all. In addition to that, the gas tank wasn’t quite full. Great, I thought; this had the signs of being one of those days, driving the car no one else wants to drive. But I needed to make some money, as I hadn’t driven last weekend, so I took the car back to 37th St. to tell Foster about the gas tank and the meter. Foster, who’s seen it all before, said, “park the car and take the meter out and bring it here.” This I did with some skepticism, and then watched as he held the meter against the heater vent in the car he was sitting in for a few minutes. “Guys have been driving this car all week,” he said. “It just needs to warm up. Try it now.” I took it back and put it in the car, and noticed that the delay time for the buttons was down to a second or two. So I drove away, parked the car on the street, and went back up to my apartment to get a little more sleep before 7 am when I usually start driving–and I took the meter with me and put it on a chair next to my bedroom radiator. That seemed to do the trick and I managed to get a day of driving out of the meter and the car.

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